Nixie
by EmmBee
Summary: Samuel Howe thought he could escape the bargain his father made the day he was born. He thought wrong. Now his fate rests in the hands of his childhood friend Gabby. Based on the Grimm fairy tale "The Nixie of the Mill-Pond."
1. Prologue: The Deal

**Author's Note: This story, like most of the things I have written in my life, is something that has been buzzing around in my head for a very long time, less demanding than some of the other more serious stuff I've been working on recently, and I've finally decided to let it come out and see what happens. Suffice to say, it is becoming quite a fun little story to write.**

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It's always dangerous to barter with fey.

Henry Howe was hardly the first person to discover this truth, of course. People had been bartering with fey for generations and had always been unhappy with their ends of the deals. But Henry Howe didn't consider the potential repercussions of his agreement. "The young thing that has just been born in your house for all the riches you will ever need," the nixie had promised him that sunny day in late summer.

Henry had known of the nixie in his father's mill pond for a long time. They grew up together, in a way; he used to play at the shore of the pond, and she would rise from the water and play with him. As they grew older, he had even found himself in love with her, the kind of passionate, obsessive love that comes of youth and inexperience and the magics of the fey. He would have given up everything, his very future, for her had his father not found out about it and quickly arranged his marriage to another girl, the tanner's daughter Anne.

"You cannot trust fey," Lucas Howe scolded his son three days before the wedding, as Henry wept for his lost love. "They are nothing but deceivers, temptresses. They would eat you as soon as look at you."

It was all true, the things Lucas Howe told his son. Fey are unpredictable, violent, and untrustworthy. But he forgot to add one thing to his list, and that thing turned out to be the most important quality of them all:

Fey, especially female fey, are vengeful.

It is not often that a fey-creature falls in love with a human. They usually prefer to remain aloof, and most consider an interaction with humans to be a great shame, a sullying of their magic and beauty and otherness. But there are exceptions. There are always exceptions.

Aila was one of them.

Her name wasn't Aila, not really—that was just Henry's shortening and slaughtering of her actual name, which couldn't be properly pronounced by a human voice. But Aila never cared that he couldn't say her name; he could have called her Bertha, and she wouldn't have cared. From the first moment she laid eyes on him as an eight-year-old boy making mudpies at the bank of her pond, she was madly, desperately—and jealously—in love with him. That is the way of the occasional fey-creature unfortunate enough to love a human.

They shared their first kiss on Henry's eighteenth birthday, just days before his father found out about them and began the hasty arrangements for his wedding. Henry Howe would bear the scars of that day for the rest of his life: five thin white lines that dragged down his shoulders and onto his arms like he had been scratched by claws.

And so it was that Aila the nixie loved Henry the miller's son. But, with his upcoming marriage to Anne, Henry felt it only right to explain that he could never see her again. And when he went to her and told her of his impending marriage, not even the tears streaming down his face could ease the pain of her breaking heart.

Or the fierce and murderous rage she felt toward young Anne Tanner for having the man she loved.

Henry Howe was a dutiful son; he married Anne and soon found, to his surprise, that it was very easy for him to love his mild-mannered, kind little wife. Anne's father gave them a little house on the far side of Thira, the nearest village, and they were very happy for several years—long enough for Henry to mostly forget about the nixie in his father's mill pond.

Fey, however, do not forget, and Aila's broken heart changed and twisted each day that she was left alone with her pain, until her grief had hardened into something else, something bitter and malicious.

It was with some trepidation that Henry struck his bargain with the beautiful nixie. She was a fey-creature, and a jilted one at that, and it made him nervous seeing the closed way she smiled at him when he first stepped on the bank of her pond. But he reasoned the fears away. She had been perfectly polite with him, happy to see him, even, and she had loved him before; she would not mean him any harm now just because it hadn't worked out the way they had wanted it to. And it was an easy-enough price to pay: the young thing that had just been born in his house. His bitch was going to whelp any day—he regretted for a moment the loss of a good pup or two. He could recover it and more when he was financially secure again, he promised himself.

Henry Howe was not the first person to be surprised when bartering with a fey-creature.

In his defense, the baby was born several weeks early, so it never even crossed Henry's mind that Aila could have meant his son. But when he stepped into his house and saw the neighbor's wife buzzing between the bedroom and the fire, heard the wail of an infant and the joyful exclamations from his wife, when his mind finally pieced together what it all meant, he was frozen solid, horrified.

And so the bitter nixie exerted her revenge on Anne, the woman who had stolen her lover's heart from her. The plan had been for Anne especially—she knew that there was nothing human women loved more than their children—but that Henry would suffer too was just as well. Let them both suffer the agony they had caused her.

Henry Howe was not the first person tricked by a fey-creature, of course, nor will he be the last. But he was the first who thought of fighting, of rebelling against his promise. It was poor judgment on his part; there is nothing that infuriates fey quite like being denied what was promised them.

Perhaps what happened was inevitable, brought on by Henry's refusal to accept or even acknowledge his end of their deal. Perhaps all would have gone more easily if Henry had just brought his son to her and let it be.

But he didn't, and he can't really be blamed. He was horrified by what he had promised, and he couldn't bear the thought of doing that to himself or his wife. And Aila's rage was such that he and everyone else got far worse than they would have expected, had they expected anything.

But, then again, so did Aila.

She got me.


	2. Neighbors

I remember the first time I met Samuel Howe, as a little girl with dark hair bouncing in pigtails and a small stuffed dog wrapped in my arms. My parents and I were newcomers to Thira, and we moved next door to the Howes just after my uncle died his slow and painful death—wasting away until he was nothing but a skeleton, all ashen skin and pointy bones and sunken eyes. I was seven at the time and horrified by the death that lived in my home. "Please, I need a change. I need fresh air and sunlight," my mother had begged of my father four days after the funeral, her eyes still red from crying, the skin beneath them still dark from countless sleepless nights spent tending to her dying brother.

So my father packed our things and moved us away from the bustle of Longborrow to the quiet, sleepy village of Thira, some fifty miles to the north.

I didn't want to go. Though I understood why my mother wanted to leave the familiar halls and rooms of our pretty home in the city, I didn't want to move. I loved Longborrow. I had good friends and a good school and a nurse who gave me little bits of chocolate after dinner. But my parents were adamant. We would move to Thira, and we couldn't bring along anything that we had in Longborrow, because, as my mother said, "We're much richer than anyone in that little village, and it wouldn't do for us to go parading in there like a bunch of royals."

I had seen the royals before; they weren't an entirely rare sight in Longborrow, since the city shared a side with Galarick, the capital, and the royals liked to inspect the areas that came nearest their castle. And they did tend to parade into a place, like their comings and goings were such a big deal that everyone must be notified. I didn't want to be like them, and I understood why we couldn't bring our pretty things with us.

That didn't mean I liked leaving my toys and books and dresses behind, of course—I pitched quite the fit when my mother told me I could only bring one plush animal and three books, and that all my dresses would have to remain in Longborrow, sold off to friends and strangers—but I understood.

We bid goodbye to Longborrow early on a clear Monday morning and arrived in Thira, tired and sore from bouncing around in a carriage, the next gray afternoon.

My father had already bought us our little two-room cottage in the village, and we moved in without incident—we had little enough to move—and practically without attracting notice. Except, of course, for the notice of our neighbor, his wife, and their young son, who watched us move into the house beside them from different points in their yard, their eyes shining with curiosity.

"Good day to you, neighbors," my father called to them when he first noticed them watching.

"And to you," our new neighbor greeted him in return, striding forward and holding out his hand to my father with a frank friendliness that I had never seen from people in the city. I would have found it pleasant, I suppose, if I hadn't thought it so strange.

My father shook his hand. I remember wrapping my arms tight around the one toy I was allowed to bring—my favorite little brown dog, a soft plush with neck and legs floppy from many years of sleeping in my bed—and half-hoping that I could disappear before the strange man talking to my father noticed me.

"The name's Howe, Henry Howe," the man said. "This lovely woman here is my wife, Anne,"—Anne Howe flushed a little at the description her husband gave her; at first glance, I thought her too short and fat to be considered lovely, but she did have a pleasant, rounded face and kind smile—"and that's our son, Samuel."

"I'm Jared Neeley. This is my wife Cassandra and our daughter Gabrielle," my father introduced us back.

Mrs. Howe took a couple smaller, shier steps forward than her husband had and smiled at us. "Are you just come to Thira, then?" she asked, her question meant for whoever cared to answer but her eyes meeting with my mother's.

"Yes, from Longborrow," my mother answered.

"Oh, then you have come a long way indeed over roads not used to travel."

Half-hidden behind my mother's skirt, I grimaced, sharply aware of the bruises on my rear end that testified to the truth of Mrs. Howe's comment.

"And, as your new neighbors, we insist that you join us for dinner tonight," she continued.

My mother flushed a little, as unused to this kind of greeting as I was. "We don't want to intrude—"

"Nonsense, my dear. It is our duty as neighbors, and, besides, I doubt you've had any thoughts or plans for food yet. I absolutely insist." Her tone left no room for argument, and my mother agreed with thanks that the other woman merely shook her head at. Then, she looked at me and smiled a smile warm enough to melt butter. "Gabrielle, is it?"

I nodded and hugged my little dog tighter to my chest for courage. "Gabby," I said in a voice so small that I almost couldn't hear it.

"Gabby. I believe my son Sam is about your age."

"I'll be eight next month," I volunteered before she asked.

Mrs. Howe's smile widened, if that was at all possible. "Just your age, then." She nudged her son, who had this whole time been standing just behind her looking at me curiously, with one hand. "Go on, Sam, why don't you say hello to our new neighbors."

Samuel Howe took two steps toward me and held out his right hand. "Hello," he said, with the same kind of simple, frank friendliness his father had expressed a few minutes before.

Call me a silly girl, but I think that may have been the moment when I first fell in love with him. I didn't realize it at the time, as I took his hand and shook it and said "Hello" back like we were a couple of adults, because I was still too young to think about falling in love. But even then, as I first shook hands with Samuel Howe, I thought that he would make a good friend, or at least good playmate.

We dropped hands and stood quiet for a long moment, Sam looking curiously at me and me looking back. We were almost the same height back then and could meet each other's eyes without any trouble. He had dark eyes, darker than his mother's but with the same chocolate shade, and hair almost the same color.

He was very nice to look at; I wished that I was that nice, but, in a crinkled dress that I had been wearing since the morning before and hair falling out of its ribbons, I doubted that I was.

After a moment, Sam looked down at the little dog I was still squeezing to my chest and asked, "What's that?"

"It's Arnold," I answered, surprised as only little girls can be that he didn't just instinctively know. I held the little plush out for him to see. "He's my dog."

Sam cocked his head to one side, examining Arnold with the same curious expression he had worn when looking at me, then looked back at me and smiled as warmly as his mother had before. "Wanna look for buried pirate treasure with me?"

At the moment, I would have been game for anything that didn't include moving into our new house, but I had always wanted to find buried pirate treasure and so agreed enthusiastically.

Our parents became very good friends over the next several months; it was never a surprise to see my mother and Mrs. Howe weeding the gardens out back, or to see Mr. Howe and my father sitting on their front porch enjoying their pipes. We had dinner with the Howes at least once every week for most of the following years. But Sam and I were inseparable from that first afternoon spending digging around in our yards hunting for buried treasure. We rigged up a system that I had read about once, a communication device with tin cans and a long piece of string stolen from my mother's sewing basket, so that we would be able to talk to each other after our mothers had put us to bed in our separate beds. And, even still, it wasn't entirely unusual for one of us to sneak into the other's bedroom after dark, where we would sit up planning the next day's adventures until we fell asleep on the same pillow.

Our parents let us be for a long time, a lot longer than I guessed most parents would let their children be. Even though most parents would have probably put a stop to such behavior as sneaking into another's bedroom by the time their children were twelve or thirteen, ours just smiled and shook their heads and sent us out to play in the garden. I was grateful for that. Sam was my best friend, the best friend I had ever had, and, in only a couple of months, I could no longer imagine life without him, any more than I could imagine living without food or air.


	3. Buried Treasure

**Author's Note: Thank you to everyone who has been reading and commenting; your feedback is much appreciated!**

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Despite spending all my waking—and most sleeping—hours with Sam, I didn't really know much about his family. I knew the big things, of course: Mrs. Howe was the daughter of the village tanner, Mr. Howe was the son of the local miller. Mr. Howe worked for the grocer three streets down—which was a surprise to a lot of people, who thought he would take over his father's mill, because Old Luke, his father, was getting, well, old. But Mr. Howe despised the mill.

Like most people in Thira, I believed him when he said that he had always hated the job of miller and had never in his life intended to take over his father's business, because why would he lie about that?

But, other than the obvious facts, I didn't really know a lot about the Howes. They were just the Howes, our neighbors, and Sam was my best friend. I was happy knowing those facts, and I didn't need to know more.

My old nurse in Longborrow used to call me a content child, "not like all the other little whining things I looked after before," she would say. And I was content. I had been content in Longborrow, and I was content in Thira before the end of our first winter there.

In my mind, the only thing worth digging for was buried treasure, so I never bothered myself about any of our neighbors' little peculiarities.

Or, rather, I rarely did. Some of those little peculiarities were odd enough for even me to notice.

Like the way Mr. Howe sometimes buried large sums of money in his backyard.

The first night I caught him doing that was just over year after my family moved to Thira, the night before Sam's ninth birthday and two weeks before my own. It was a heavy, hot night, the kind where you could drown by breathing the air, and I was sitting awake and alone by my opened window, staring up at the stars and wishing that it would cool off enough for me to get comfortable and go to sleep. A flare of light caught my attention back from the stars. I thought at first it was coming from Sam's window, and I started to stand, ready to do whatever he wanted to do, but the light was quickly hooded and disappeared from the window, only to reappear at a window further back from the road.

Then the Howes' back door opened, and Mr. Howe stepped out of it, a mostly-hooded lantern in one hand and a large cloth bag and garden trowel in the other. He glanced back into the house as though making sure that no one had heard him, then, apparently satisfied that no one had, set down the lantern and softly closed the door. Scooping up the lantern again, he crept toward the very edge of his property, toward the bare spot in the backyard where Mrs. Howe had never successfully grown anything, knelt down, and began to dig.

He dug and dug, until he had made a hole almost as deep as his arm and at least as wide as his two outstretched hands. When he was finished, he rocked back on his heels and stared at the sagging cloth bag, which I could see by the faint light of the hooded lantern was stuffed full. The expression that crossed his face as he looked at the bag was one I will never forget, a strange mix of rage and defiance and regret—on his honest, pleasant face, the ferocity of his expression was both confusing and frightening. His hands balled into fists, so tight that his knuckles turned so vividly white that I could see it even from my window.

He stared at the bag for a very long time, his expression growing angrier and his knuckles growing whiter with every minute. When he did move again, it was to grab the bag and hold it in both hands like he was trying to strangle it. "Damn you, you soulless, heartless demon, I should have killed you years ago!" he spat in a whisper so loud and angry that it was practically a shout.

I figured he had a brownie in the bag. I had never seen a brownie before, but my old nurse had told me once that they were the curse of any household unfortunate enough to be infected with them.

So I was surprised when he tipped the bag over to pour its contents into the hole, and no brownies came tumbling out of it. No brownies, but a large amount of gold coins.

I knew that some of the smaller fey, like brownies and pixies, can turn into other things to fool the humans they are trying to trick, but not even the cleverest fey-creature can turn into gold. Something about its purity and value prevents them from assuming the right shape and color. Gold is the one thing that we magic-less humans can be sure is always what it seems to be.

That much gold could have probably made his family richer than the royals, with enough left over to build a mansion for every single person in Thira and Longborrow combined—and there Mr. Howe was, pouring it all into a hole at the back of his garden, wearing the most ferocious expression I had ever seen on a man's face.

But he never seemed to think twice about what he was doing. He poured every coin into that hole, then, scraping the dirt he had dug up over it, buried it all. When he was finished, he stood up, dirty down to his waist, spat into the dirt, and whisper-shouted again, "Damn you, you bloody cursed demon!" before grabbing his lantern and whirling back toward his house.

I don't remember going back to bed or falling asleep that night, but I must have, because Sam woke me the next morning by crawling through my opened window and shaking my shoulder. "Gabby? C'mon, Gabby, my father gave me two bronze just now for my birthday, and, if we hurry, we can get to the baker's before the muffins get cold," he said.

"And a good morning to you, too," I groaned as I sat up. I've never much liked mornings.

Sam just rolled his eyes and told me that he would be out back whenever I was ready. He has been a morning person for as long as I have known him.

I dressed slowly, my brain fogged up by my strange, half-remembered dreams. Had I really watched Mr. Howe bury a small mountain of gold coins in his backyard last night? I almost laughed at myself as I thought about it. It must have been a dream; no one but a pirate would really bury such treasure, and certainly not in the middle of the night like they were trying to hide it before anyone found out about it—and I was quite sure that Mr. Howe was not a pirate.

Though I had myself thoroughly convinced that what I saw the night before had been nothing but a dream by the time I met Sam, I couldn't help but pause at the bare spot in the Howes' back garden where I thought his father had buried all the gold.

The dirt in that spot had been freshly dug up, the hand prints on the top still clear.

I never mentioned it to Sam, what I had seen his father do the night before his birthday. Mr. Howe had obviously taken a lot of care to conceal his deed from his family, and it seemed wrong for me to be the one to tell them about it, so I didn't.

But that wasn't the last time I watched our neighbor steal out of his house in the middle of the night to bury large sums of money in his backyard. In fact, he did it every year, with clockwork regularity, on the night before Sam's birthday, always on the same night, always in the same spot. I would have suspected there was something uncanny about it simply because he a poor man who shouldn't have that much money to bury without the added strangeness of the fact that he always buried the money in the same bare spot in the garden, every year, but the hole he dug was always empty. Never once, on the night he would bury the money, did he unearth last year's booty.

Every year on that night I would watch him dig a large hole in the garden, pour into it enough gold to make the royals look like paupers, then stand and curse his nameless demon before turning back into his house and laying two bronzes on Sam's pillow as a birthday present.

As I've said, I was not an overly-curious child, but this strange ritual was one thing that burned me up with curiosity. Where did the money come from, and where did it go? Why did Henry Howe feel compelled to bury it in his backyard? Who was the demon that he would curse so violently as he dug? And why did he do it only on that particular night, the night before his son's birthday?

I thought many times about asking, but it never felt right to bring it up, so I didn't. And, in time, it became in my mind just something that Mr. Howe did, and I accepted it, then eventually forgot about it.


	4. The Mill Pond

"You must be the Neeleys. My son's told me so much about you that I almost think we're friends already. Please, come in, and make yourselves comfortable."

It took me exactly that long to understand where the Howes got that frank friendliness of theirs: they had obviously inherited it from Old Luke, Mr. Howe's father.

My father shook the old man's outstretched hand. "Thank you," he said.

Old Luke smiled and ushered us into his house. He had the two-room house that was most common in the village—packed dirt floor, thatch roof, wooden plank walls, stone chimney. In fact, the house was so completely ordinary that I might have been anywhere in or around Thira. But, through the window, something glinted in the morning sunlight.

A pond.

I've always loved water. Before we moved to Thira, every summer my parents and I would always go down to the shores of the Talthan Sea for a couple of days. It had been years since the last time I had been near more water than was contained in the town well.

"Sam, why don't you and Gabby go play outside," Mrs. Howe suggested, giving both of us a small push toward the door.

Sam, who had decided recently that he didn't appreciate his mother treating him like a child anymore, rolled his eyes at his mother's tone of voice, but he opened the door and started outside.

"And don't get too close to the water!" Mr. Howe's shouted warning was almost lost behind the closing door.

It was a bright, beautiful morning, with just an edge of autumn chill still lingering in the air. Sam led me around the front of his grandfather's house, near where the surrounding trees began claiming the old miller's yard, toward the pond in the back.

"Why shouldn't you get too close to the water?" I wondered after a minute.

Sam shrugged. "Because my father's strange about water. I think he nearly drowned once when he was younger, and he's worried that I might, too."

"You don't know how to swim?"

Sam shook his head and shrugged again. Six months ago, I would have teased him about being able to do something he couldn't, then offered to teach him to swim. But I recognized the disinterested expression on his face—it was something I had been seeing on him increasingly often in the past few months—so I let the subject drop.

The past several months had been difficult between us. My mother insisted it was normal for childhood friendships to change over time, and in particular during the teenage years, which we had both recently entered. She told me about her childhood friend, who had been her constant companion until they turned fourteen, at which point they began "drifting apart." "It's normal, Gabby," she said. "People grow up, and friendships change." But I had been sure that Sam and I wouldn't change. We had been such good friends for such a long time, I was sure that couldn't change.

I was wrong. Without any conscious decision that I knew about, we had begun the long and terrifying process of growing up and growing apart.

We walked in silence to the pond. This pond was obviously dug; the gradual descent of land into water that is a feature of natural bodies of water was missing. Instead, the shore dropped away almost vertically into the water, as though the land had been cut away. I pulled off my shoes and socks and sat on the bank with my feet dangling in the water. Sam sat some feet back from me, picking up bits of sand and rock and tossing them into the pond. The surface rippled and glittered every time one of his projectiles struck it.

I don't know how long we sat like that, in a strained silence that was becoming an increasingly-prominent feature of our relationship, before I noticed the thing in the water, but it was long enough for my feet to have turned icy cold and slightly shriveled. At first, I thought the glittering and rippling of the water was playing tricks on my eyes, because of course there wasn't really a face in the water. But as I continued to look at it, it continued to look back, not changing or disappearing as I stared.

It was a female face—a very beautiful female face, with silver-white skin and eyes so dark they appeared black.

_Why do you disturb my pool?_

The voice was high and sweet, the tone curiously friendly, and, as they were spoken—if they were in fact spoken—the face in the water came closer to the surface, and a smile appeared on the full, pale lips. But there was something alarming about the way the words sounded, the way they echoed through the air, as though shouted across an open plain despite the forest of trees that surrounded the pond. They twisted around my breath, too, sucked it right out of my chest and throat until I was gasping for air.

I knew I was sitting securely on dry land, but I still felt like I was drowning.

I pulled my feet out of the pond and slid away from the water, but Sam had the opposite reaction to the sound of the voice; he stood and took two steps toward the bank. "Did you hear that?" he asked, the question not directed at me but spoken aloud anyway.

"Yes," I answered, unable to quite hide the fear leaking into my voice. As fiercely as I have ever wanted anything, I wanted both of us away from the pond and the thing that lurked beneath its surface. "Now, let's go somewhere else. Please."

Sam took another step toward the water. "There's someone down there," he mumbled, again not to me.

The vagueness in his voice scared me, and my voice rose in response as I struggled to catch his attention. "Sam, I don't think we should be here."

"You go on, then." He waved one hand in the direction of his grandfather's house and knelt on the bank a few feet to my right, his gaze fixed on the woman's face. The hand he had waved me away with reached toward the surface.

Because I was watching, I saw the instant that the alluring smile on those beautiful lips twisted into a ferocious grimace, exposing the two rows of evilly-pointed teeth in the creature's mouth. In that instant, I also saw what was going to happen when Sam touched the water. But his fingers brushed the surface before I had time even to draw enough breath to warn him.

A pale hand leapt from the water, wrapped its unnaturally-long finger around his wrist, and retreated under again, dragging him with it.

"_Sam!"_ I screamed, lunging for him and only just able to grab him around the waist before the hand dragged him completely underwater. Still, even with me digging my heels into the dirt and holding onto him with all my strength, the hand was stronger. Sam was being thrashed side to side as the hand tried to break my grip; I locked my fingers around my elbows and fought to hang on. "Help! _Help!_ The pond, someone, please!" My feet were skidding towards the edge of the bank.

The door to the house slammed shut. Three seconds later, I felt arms join mine around Sam's waist, and both of us were ripped away from the water. Sam fell back against me, coughing and gasping, his head and shoulders drenched from pond water. Five long, bloody gashes from the top of his wrist all the way down to the middle of his fingers proved that those unnaturally-long fingers ended in some vicious claws.

Mr. Howe stood over us, breathing hard, his eyes wide with fear and something else I couldn't name but that reminded me of the pain/anger/regret expression he wore whenever he buried his gold.

_We had a deal, Henry Howe, and you owe me your end of the bargain._ The sweet, high voice was now distorted by fury, fury powerful enough to make the water thrash as though in the middle of a storm, and all the more frightening because the voice didn't lose its sweetness.

Mr. Howe's lips compressed, the fear in his eyes replaced by hatred. "I owe you nothing, you heartless demon!" he growled back. "I never have!"

The water lashed against the bank, but the voice only tinkled a laugh that quickly changed into a scream as loud and piercing as a baby's wail. Or, at least, that's what it sounded like to me. To Sam and his father—and I can only assume my father and Old Luke, too—it must have been much worse: Mr. Howe collapsed to his knees, his hands jammed against his ears; Sam, who had by then sat up and was trying to stem the bleeding at his wrist, clenched his teeth together and bent toward the ground in unmistakable pain.

I jumped to my feet. "Stop it, you're hurting them!" I shrieked above the noise.

The scream trickled off into another high, bubbly laugh. _Bold little girl,_ the voice said, and the thrashing of the water and the echoes of the voice stopped, leaving the mill pond and its surrounding woods eerily still and silent.

Mr. Howe stayed on his knees, his forehead just touching the ground, for a moment after the scream had ended, his back and shoulders heaving with shaking, heavy breaths. I knelt down beside Sam again and touched his shoulder. "Are you all right?" I asked. All volume had been lost from my voice, and I was barely even able to whisper the words.

Sam looked up from his bleeding wrist. He was drenched down past his shoulders and covered with a thin greenish-brown film of pond scum that I hadn't seen on the surface of the water. Blood was trickling through the fingers of his uninjured hand and pulsing from several deep puncture wounds on the inside of his wrist where the creature's claws must have dug in hard. There was a new haunted look in his eyes, too, like he had seen something truly horrific, something that mortal men shouldn't ever have to see.

He didn't answer my question—he didn't need to; I could see for myself that he was not all right—only pressed his unscratched hand harder against his wrist and dropped his forehead against my shoulder.

I slid my arms around him and looked up, noticing only at that moment that whatever confrontation we had just survived had drawn all the adults out of the house. My parents were standing a ways back, near the house itself, looking anxious and confused. Old Luke was shaking his head in an angry-but-knowing sort of way. But it was Mrs. Howe who spoke first. "Henry, what was that?" she demanded, her voice breathless.

Mr. Howe got back to his feet very, very slowly, like an old man with stiff joints. He took a long look at everyone, letting his eyes linger longest over his wife and son, then heaved a deep sigh and said, "I suppose it's time you all knew about Aila."


	5. Confession

Mr. Howe explained everything right there on the bank of his father's mill pond while Mrs. Howe and I saw to Sam's wounds and my parents and Old Luke listened from nearer the house. He told us about how he had once loved the nixie that lived in the pond and how he had with his marriage to his wife broken the fey-creature's heart—"I love you, Anne," he insisted at that point when Mrs. Howe had looked up at him with a frown, "and I don't regret marrying you. I have never regretted anything since I met you, except…except what I did…later."

Then he told us about the financial crisis he had found himself in several years after his wedding. "You remember it, Anne, how Terrance wasn't able to pay me, and we were in debt up to here." He held his hand to the level of his eyeballs. "I didn't know what else to do, so I…I went to Aila, hoping that she would help me. I was a fool to think it." He kicked at the ground then, viciously, angry at himself.

"What happened, Henry?" Mrs. Howe asked. In all the years I had known her, I had never heard her sound so cold.

Mr. Howe kicked the ground harder and didn't answer.

Mrs. Howe got to her feet and grabbed her husband by the shoulders. "Henry Lucas Howe, if you value our life together, you will tell me what happened!"

I looked away from them, down at Sam's unbandaged hand which I held tight in one of my own. That kind of threat coming from kind, mild-mannered Anne Howe was frightening, just like the rage and pain I saw one night a year on Mr. Howe's friendly, handsome face.

Mr. Howe's answer came in a heavy, halting voice. "She agreed to provide us with all the wealth we could ever need in exchange for…for the young thing that had just been born in our house."

I wasn't the first of his listeners to put the implications of that deal together with the events of that day; I could see in the way that Sam's jaw dropped and his eyebrows furrowed that he immediately understood what his father had promised the nixie. But I was the first to say it aloud—though, considering that shock had sucked away all my breath, "aloud" might not be the right word to describe it. In fact, I'm not sure I didn't just mouth the words. "You promised her Sam."

"I thought…I thought it was one of Perita's puppies; she was due to whelp that day or the next, and Sam—Sam, I don't know if you know this, but you were born, oh, nearly three weeks earlier than expected. If I had known…you know I wouldn't've…Anne, darling, you know I would have never—"

Mrs. Howe pulled back from her husband at the mention of her son's name. For a long moment, she stood in front of him, still and white, then, at that second, lifted her right hand and smacked him across the cheek.

Everyone jumped as the sound of her hand hitting his face cracked against the surface of the pond. Sam's fingers tightened around mine until the pressure was painful, but I was terrified of letting him know, afraid that any sound or motion from me would turn whatever was possessing Mrs. Howe's body on us.

Mrs. Howe pounded her fists against her husband's shoulders and chest, tears streaking down her round face. "Our son!" she screamed. "You promised our son to a fey-creature, to a _demon_! How could you? And how could you look me in the face all these years and tell me you love me when you've done something like that?"

"Anne, sweetheart, listen to me," Mr. Howe begged, reaching up to grab his wife's hands, but Mrs. Howe pulled away from him, snarling like an angry dog not to touch her. She spun on her heel and marched toward the house, leaving Mr. Howe to call after her, "We don't owe that creature anything. I've never touched her money, not once in all these years!"

The only response he got was the sound of the front door slamming shut.

Mr. Howe looked down at his son, who had turned a horrified shade of white with his story, then, surprisingly enough, at me. "We don't owe her anything," he repeated, his teeth coming together with an audible click. "Thirteen years of money, and I haven't touched a bronze of it. Not one bronze, not even in times of direst need, not once in thirteen years! She can foist all the wealth we will ever need on me if she wants, but it means nothing if I don't use it. Nothing!" He stalked off after his wife.

After he was gone, Sam and I stared at each other for a long time, trying to understand what had happened that morning, but understanding was not something within my reach. Mr. and Mrs. Howe were not people I had thought capable of exploding like that. And his arguments made no sense: if Mr. Howe hadn't touched a constantly-increasing supply of wealth in thirteen years, how had he been able to hide the evidence of it from his family?

"He buried it," I said, the words coming out of my mouth at the exact second that I thought them.

"What?" Sam asked, his mind somewhere else altogether.

"Your father. He buried the money. Every year, on the night before your birthday, he's been burying huge bags of gold coins in that bare spot in your back garden. That's probably why nothing grows there, because he's always digging it up and filling it with gold."

Sam looked down at his hand, the bandage around it stained red with blood. I wished that I could hear his thoughts—hear them and ease their sharp edges. That morning had been a strange one for me; I couldn't imagine how difficult it must have been for him, scratched, and nearly drowned, by an angry fey-creature, then finding out his own father had unwittingly bartered him away for money and seeing his mother explode like a bomb in front of him. But I was helpless to do anything save sit quietly beside him and leave him to his thoughts.

My parents let us be for a while, until my mother summoned us in to eat. The mood in Old Luke's house was uncomfortable. Sam's parents, both red-faced and tight-lipped, came out from the other room—the door to which was not thick enough to dim the sounds of their fighting—and ate with everyone. Mrs. Howe took the chair to Sam's right, turned her chair so that her back was toward her husband, and fussed over her son; Mr. Howe, after twisting around so that he wasn't facing his wife and a long time spent staring silently at his plate, struck up a conversation with my father.

I doubted that the Howes would ever again be the peaceful family I had known.

After the meal, Mr. and Mrs. Howe retreated to the relative privacy of the other room, and the shouting that started up again had my ears ringing in under two minutes. My father glanced toward the closed door and grimaced. "Cassandra, Gabby, I think now would be a good time to start home," he suggested.

My mother nodded agreement.

My father held out his hand to Old Luke and tried to smile. "Thank you for inviting us into your home," he said.

Old Luke shook his hand. "It was my pleasure. Feel free to come by again." He smiled wide at my mother and winked at me. "Anytime you feel like coming by, Miss Gabby, you're welcome."

We hadn't even made it to the door before Sam spoke up. "Mr. Neeley? Could I come home with you?" he asked, the tone of his voice making it clear that he didn't want to listen to his parents shouting anymore.

My mother reached her hand out to him before my father even had a chance to say yes.

We didn't get home until late that night. Though my parents had seen Sam safely into his own bed before they went to sleep themselves, he was crawling through my window and sitting on my bed less than an hour afterward—something he hadn't done in at least a year. "It's too dark over there," he whispered as he sat down.

"You can stay the night here if you want," I offered in a whisper, shifting until I was sitting beside him at the edge of the bed.

He smiled unsteadily. "Thanks." Then his eyes wandered toward the window, and the haunted look I had seen that morning crept across his expression.

"Sam?"

"I've never seen anything like it," he mumbled. Unsure of whether he was talking about the nixie or his parents, I kept quiet. He shook his head, slowly, as though trying to clear his thoughts, then looked back at me with another unsteady smile. "You saved my life this morning, you know."

I dropped my head and began fiddling with a small bump on my bed quilt, not sure how to respond to that statement. It hadn't really been a conscious decision—I don't think I even had any real thoughts at the moment that the hand had reached up and started to pull him into the water, just a surge of panic. I shrugged. That wasn't the best response to his statement, but it was the only one I could think of.

Sam leaned over and kissed my cheek, just once and very quickly, but the gesture was so unexpected that my head nearly whacked his nose as it whipped around to gawk at him. Still, by the time I was looking at him again, he was already staring down at his hands, his face red. But he was smiling, and more genuinely than before, and, after a moment, I was, too. "Thank you, Gabby," he said at his hands.

I reached up with one hand and touched the place where he had kissed me, my smile growing until it threatened to jump off my face and walk away. "Anytime," I said back.

When my father came to wake me up the next morning, he found us both asleep on my bed, our hands joined and our fingers intertwined.


	6. Changes

**Happy Easter!**

--

Years passed, as years tend to do. Though Thira didn't change much, life in it began to after the incident at Old Luke's mill pond. The biggest and most immediate change was in the Howe household. Mr. and Mrs. Howe, who had once been a peaceful, happy couple, barely even spoke to each other for months after that day, and, when they had no choice but to communicate, it would take only seconds before they began yelling.

During the earliest days of their constant fighting, Sam would escape to our house, and my parents and I would sit silently with him in our main room, through the quiet almost able to make out the sounds of the shouting from next door. Sometimes my mother would try to talk into the pressing silences, asking Sam about his schoolwork or plans for the weekend, or whatever other easy topics she could find, but he wasn't really interested in talking, and her attempts would always fall flat after a few minutes.

It wasn't very long until Sam began disappearing from the area all together whenever his parents were fighting—where he would go, he never said, but there was one day that I saw him walking down the road surrounded by some of the older schoolboys, the ones that were generally considered bad news in the village. When I asked him about it, though, he just shrugged and said that they had invited him to play ball in the north field.

I didn't believe him, but he refused to answer my questions, so I let it be.

The only good thing that came of that day at Old Luke's mill pond was Old Luke himself. For reasons I never fully understood, he had taken a liking to me, and, every time he came down to the village to sell his flour and other goods, he would stop by our house and eat a meal with us, then would sit at the table and tell stories. He knew almost everything there was to know about a great many things—more things than I had ever expected a miller to know, and especially about things that would have been considered old wives' tales in Longborrow: magic and curses and fey. Since the day Mr. Howe had told his story about the nixie Aila, I had been developing an interest in fey, what they were and why they were that way, and Old Luke could tell stories like no one else could. Stories of curses and magic and heroes who fought dragons, and, when I asked if they were true, he would smile. "Could be, Miss Gabby," he'd say, winking at me as he said my name. "I've never fought a dragon, but that hardly means that no one ever has."

The first months were the hardest. But, after a time, as things slowly began to settle down at the Howes', and Mr. and Mrs. Howe finally began to reach some kind of truce that allowed them to behave civilly, if not particularly warmly, toward each other, life in Thira found a new routine. It wasn't what it had been, not even a little; the house next door, which used to be a warm and welcoming place, was decidedly cooler afterward, reflecting as it always did the feelings its owners had toward each other. Sam continued to disappear several afternoons a week without ever mentioning to anyone where he was or what he was doing—though that habit, like his parents' shouting, began tapering off after a while, but the damage of it had been done, and we rarely spoke, hardly even acknowledged each other, before a full year had gone by.

I didn't like that our friendship had come so undone in so little time, but, as best I could tell, it seemed to bother Sam less, and there really wasn't much I could do. Properly-working friendships really need both sides to want it, and Sam never really seemed interested in wanting it. So I had no choice but to let it go, and I found myself in the frightening position of having to make new friends.

That was when I met Laura Carter.

Actually, saying that I first met her then is not completely true. I knew Laura for several years before we really became friends; we had been in the same classes since she had moved to Thira, and, of all the girls in my class, I had always thought her the nicest. We had even spoken on occasion—she would ask me what I thought of the previous day's schoolwork, I would tell her where to get the best blueberry muffins in the market, we would smile and nod when we passed each other on the streets. But I wouldn't call her a proper friend, because I never really knew her better than as a recognized face, back then when all our interactions were limited to nodding at each other from across the street.

I don't exactly remember how we started being friends, if I began to sit next to her in classes or if she began talking to me more often over our midday break. Probably it was a combination of both. What I do remember was the first time she invited me over to her house for dinner, because that was the night I found out that her parent had died when she was very young and that the stern but kind couple I had always thought were her parents were actually her aunt and uncle. That was also the first time she called me her friend. "Aunt Mary, Uncle Stew, this is my friend Gabby," she said.

I liked Laura a lot; she was a pretty girl with big round eyes that made her always look a little surprised, and the way she would hop around, her head tilting toward whatever noises she could hear, always reminded me of a bird, one of those curious, friendly kinds of birds that is always flitting from place to place. That was Laura—a friendly, bird-like girl, and I liked her.

Then, one day, Sam broke the long silence between us. "Hi, Gabby," he greeted me one afternoon as I stood outside the schoolhouse, waiting for Laura to finish a project.

It had been over a year since the last time Sam and I had exchanged more than a word or two, and the fact that he had come up to me, smiling and casual, left me gaping. "Uh…hi," I mumbled as soon as I remembered that gaping was rude. Heat rushed through my face. He had grown up a lot since the last time we had talked, and that realization made me nervous: he was no longer the boy I had known, and I found myself both fiercely wanting to and terribly scared of finding out what I had missed.

He laughed, louder than I was used to. "What's that look for?"

I cleared my throat and tried again, striving for a little more normalcy. "Hi, Sam. How are you?"

"All right. You?"

I shrugged. "All right."

We petered off, out of things to say. I stared down at the book in my arm, rubbing at a tiny speck of dirt that had blown onto the cracked binding as if my life suddenly depended on the cleanliness of the shabby old textbook.

The five seconds of silence that stretched out between us felt longer than the nearly-two years that we hadn't spoken at all before, to relief so intense that I actually sighed out loud, Laura flounced to my side. "Okay, that should be the end of that," she said to me, her voice happy. Then, noticing Sam, she smiled and said, "Hello there."

Sam straightened a little, and I noticed again just how much he had grown up—he must have been taller than his father. It made me feel out-of-sorts somehow, like I was suddenly seven years old again and just meeting the new neighbors. "Gabby, aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?" he asked, and the way he said that made it sound like this was the whole reason he had even come to talk to me in the first place.

I was sorely tempted to say no and pull Laura away with me, but I didn't, aware of how rude that would make me look both to him and to Laura. "Sam, this is my friend Laura Carter," I said instead with the appropriate hand gesturing. "Laura, Samuel Howe."

Sam held out his hand with all the frank friendliness that had made me first love him. "It's a pleasure, Laura."

Laura smiled again and shook his hand. "It is," she agreed.

"Now, if you'll excuse us, we have to get going." The words jumped out of my mouth before I had even known they were there, and I grabbed Laura's arm and began walking away, my face heating up with embarrassment again. I fought to ignore the sensation.

"What's gotten into you?" Laura demanded, pulling her arm out of my grip and pausing to glance back at Sam, who was watching us go with a distressed look on his face. "He seems nice."

"Oh, he is," I told her, the words burning my tongue like lit matches as they came out. "Very nice. Now, can we please just go home?"

Laura rolled her eyes. "You are the oddest girl on the planet, I'm sure." But she let me lead her back to her house, where we spent the evening studying our history books. At least, Laura did; I spent all of that evening and most of that night fighting down all the emotions that were swirling and jostling inside my stomach.

That was not was not the last night of sleep I would lose to a knotted stomach and a confused head. Soon, it became clear that Sam had developed a very serious crush on Laura, and it was only a matter of a week or two before Laura admitted that she was equally interested in him.

I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do with that information. While I liked that his having an interest in my friend meant I got to see him almost as often as I had when we were children, watching Sam fall in love with Laura made me feel strange, floppy in the limbs like Arnold, my old stuffed dog—a once-loved toy tossed aside when the child grows out of sleeping with stuffed animals.

I dug Arnold out of a pile of discarded clothing the night that Sam first asked Laura to dinner. It had been years since I had played with Arnold, but, that night, I hugged him to my chest and crawled into bed, smoothing out the rumpled, patchy hair on his head. "I'm sorry, Arnold," I whispered, not sure what I was apologizing for but inexplicably needing the forgiveness of my favorite old plaything. "I never should've put you away, never should've let them tell me that I was too grown up to play with you, and I'm sorry. I still love you, though, I really do. You still love me, don't you? Don't you?" As I said the words, it became obvious that, even though I was whispering into Arnold's floppy ear, I wasn't really talking to the little dog in my arms.

Then I spent half the night crying against his understuffed neck.


	7. Proposal

**Author's Note: My apologies for the tardiness of this update; between the chaos that is the looming end of the semester and the difficulty this chapter was giving me, there was no way to get it up on time. I appreciate everyone's patience (or, conversely, I'm gratified by everyone's impatience), and I thank you for reading and enjoying!**

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Laura perched on my bed, her fingers fluttering nervously over the loose yellow sleeve of her dress, something they had been doing for the last ten minutes. "I don't know," she said, standing and twirling in a tight circle in front of me. "I don't think yellow is the right color—"

I couldn't entirely repress my weary sigh. "It is, Laura. We both know it is. You look beautiful." And she did—the sunshine-yellow of the dress brought out the ruddy-golden highlights in her brown curls, and the gauzy material on the sleeves fluttered like wings in the midsummer evening breeze.

She ran her hand across her waistline and sat back down on the edge of my bed, only to hop up a second later and pace to my bedroom door and back. "I know. But this isn't just any night. Tonight is special. Tonight is…well, you know. _The_ night."

I smiled at her and willed my twitchy fingers to remain still. I did know. Three weeks ago, Laura had bounded to my side and whispered, her voice so fast that the words had been almost indecipherable, "You'll never believe it, Gabby, but, last night, Sam asked my uncle for permission to ask for my hand, and Uncle Stew, he said yes, and now I need you to find out when and how Sam is planning to propose to me!"

So I had spent the past three weeks trying to act nonchalant as, working on Laura's orders, I dug around in Sam's evasive, half-formed plans for when and how he would ask Laura to marry him. I wasn't much of a liar, and I know that Sam discovered the conspiracy between us girls, so I half-thought that some of the information he let leak wasn't entirely truthful, but all signs and plans and gleaned information pointed to this night, this balmy, breezy, sunny evening in midsummer, as being the night he would ask the question. Sam would be coming over at seven this evening to take Laura out, and, with that hour looming, Laura was growing increasingly anxious.

I grabbed her hand before she could start another round of pacing. "Relax," I ordered, rubbing her hand between both of mine. "Breathe. It'll be all right."

Laura closed her eyes and pulled in a few deep breaths. "All right. It'll be all right." She sounded unconvinced.

"It will. I promise you, it will be all right."

She opened her eyes and smiled down at me where I still sat on the bed. "I know. I know it will. I'm just…nervous, I guess. I mean, when he asks, what should I say?"

"'Yes' is usually a good answer," I suggested, a little wryly.

With a long sigh deep enough to sound like it came from the soles of her feet, she plunked down beside me, and we sat in silence, our hands clasped, for a long time. I tried very hard not to think about the last time I sat like this beside someone, because the last time I had, it had been Sam's hand I was holding, and I couldn't afford a jumbled and upset stomach while Laura was looking to me for a little peace.

My mother poked her head into my room some time later. "Laura," she said, smiling a little, "there's someone at the door for you."

Both Laura and I leapt to our feet at the same moment, as fast as though we had been pricked with needles. She dropped my hand and, with one last swipe along the waistline of her dress and a flick of her head that sent her curls back over her shoulder, she marched out of my room, the firmness in her face declaring that she was ready for anything. I followed her at more of a shuffle, intending to see her off and wish her luck—because she was my friend, and I wanted this for her.

As to whether my heart would be in the gesture, well, that was a question best left unasked.

Sam was waiting just inside our front door, his combed hair and spotless white shirt making him look as tidy as I had ever seen him. He nodded and smiled in my direction when I looked up at him. "Evening, Gabby," he said politely, his attention already wandering back to Laura.

"Hi, Sam," I said back, trying to match his tone but not entirely succeeding. "I hear that tonight's, uh…" Sam knew that I had already told Laura about his plan for the evening, I was sure, but, halfway through the statement, I thought maybe I shouldn't be making it so blatantly obvious. "Any idea about what you're doing?"

Sam met my eyes for a moment, then glanced back at Laura, and the smile that tugged at the corners of his mouth was one I once knew very well: mischievous and secretive and promising some kind of adventure. "It's a surprise, actually," he answered after a second of hesitation. Laura bit her bottom lip and looked down at her feet.

I kept my voice light. "Mmm-hmm. Well, you kids have fun tonight."

Sam offered Laura his arm, which she took, and they turned to the door. I started after them to close the door; Laura's free hand darted out to grab mine, and I held it tightly for two seconds. Then, with a squeeze and a quick smile, I let them out of the house.

As I was shutting the door, Sam happened to glance back at me. Our eyes locked and held, and my breath actually stopped coming. I knew I had to let go of my silly little-girl fantasies about Sam and me, because they were never going to come true. We were grown up now, and he was going to marry Laura, and I was going to a schoolteacher if I could manage it. I would make myself permanently ill clinging to a withered old once-upon-a-time fantasy. I knew that. Still, it could be very hard to remember sometimes, the way it was at that moment.

I shut the door harder than necessary.

The storm that blew up that night came unnaturally fast—at nine o'clock, the sky was clear, still light from the long hours of summer days; at 9:02, rain was tearing at the windows, wind roaring around the house, thunder shaking the ground beneath my feet. My parents and I had to rush around the room pulling the shutters closed before our packed-dirt floor became a puddle of mud. With the last shutter closed, my father leaned against the wall, listening to the ferocious noise being made by the storm, and shook his head. "It's not normal," he muttered, not really to either my mother or me but aloud because there was someone to hear. "Weather doesn't sneak up on a place like this. It's not natural."

The only thing I could think of as he said that was the waves in Old Luke's mill pond thrashing in fury against their banks, the way they had that morning when Sam was almost taken by the nixie. Aila, I remembered. My stomach twisted uncomfortably, and I hoped that, wherever Sam and Laura were, they had a roof and walls sheltering them from the storm.

I went to bed an hour later but couldn't sleep; the angry sounds of the wind and rain kept me awake and shivering beneath my blanket.

The house next door was still dark when I finally did fall asleep.

I don't know when exactly it was that the desperate knocking on the front door woke me up. It was late, and useful consciousness was lost in that confused, groggy state that happens when one is jerked awake from a restless sleep. The storm had lost some of its ferocity, though lightening and thunder occasionally tore apart the darkness. I could hear Laura's voice, hysterical and nearly incomprehensible, on the other side of my door, and my parents making calming noises beneath her sobs.

Laura shouldn't sound like that. It was that thought that drove me from bed and out to the other room, blinking against the light of my parents' lantern.

She had obviously been caught in the worst of the storm: her hair was windblown, and her bright yellow dress was splattered with mud. Every inch of her, from the top of her head to the soles of her feet, was completely drenched; the ripped hem of her dress dripped muddy water onto the floor. She was sobbing and gasping and trying to speak while my mother bustled around fetching cups of coffee and my father patted her shoulder and said quiet words in a calming voice.

When I came out of my room, she leapt toward me, and I could see that her eyes were blood-shot from crying and wild with fear. I caught her arms and held her steady. "Laura, Laura, what's wrong?" I whispered. "What's wrong? What happened?"

I think some part of me already knew the answer. Right from the moment the storm began, I believe that I had been thinking in that direction, that some ominous little instinct had been telling me that this had happened.

Because, when Laura was finally able to splutter out her message, it didn't surprise me at all. It was frightening, horrifying, but not surprising. "It's Sam," she sobbed between breaths. "He's gone."


	8. Comb

Laura's story came out slowly, between long moments of panicked tears and gasping breaths, but it did eventually come out.

"He brought me out to Old Luke's—to his grandfather's place, and we had a sort of picnic dinner near the mill pond. It was so pretty, with the sun shining on it, so pretty and quiet and still. And we got to messing around, and I pushed him toward the edge of the pond—not in, of course, because I know he can't swim, but just near the edge—and then the wind started. It came up so fast, the storm, so fast that neither of us even noticed it 'til there was rain pouring down on us. And then…this _voice_. Female. Told Sam to come closer to the water. It made me feel like…like I was drowning, but he listened to it, and then…" She faded off into broken, horrified sobs.

I pulled her head against my shoulder and rubbed her back. "It's all right, Laura," I mumbled in her ear. "It'll be all right."

Though I said the words with all the confidence I could manage, I didn't believe them; everything had suddenly become much less all right than it had been to start with. Aila had finally gotten what she believed she was due, and now Sam was gone—forever. The pain of that thought was overwhelming.

No. I didn't believe that. There had to be some way to get him back, rescue him. There had to be some way to trick a trickster.

I tried to remember the stories Old Luke had told me over the years about the fey. They were violent, manipulative, and unpredictable, but they had to uphold their deals. That was in their blood, irrevocably intermingled with their magic. Cross them and they would lash out with all their powers, but bargain with them and they would have to do as they promised.

It wasn't much of a plan, and I knew it would be harder than it sounded—this nixie already had a history of tricking more than her fair share out of the humans she dealt with—but it was the only thing to do. Despite the distance the years had forced between us, I still loved Sam more than enough to try. "It'll be all right, Laura," I repeated, this time believing the words. "We'll get him back, you'll see. I know who to talk to."

"Mr. Howe, you've got to tell me everything you know about the nixie in your father's mill pond."

Mr. Howe looked up from his pipe, squinting a little as though he were staring into the sun. His face was lined and weary in ways I hadn't noticed before; in that moment, it struck me that he was old, older suddenly than my father even though their actual age difference was barely two years. "I'd rather not," he sighed. Even his voice sounded older, wearier, than I remembered it being.

"I know. But she's got Sam, and I need to know what could tempt her to bargain with me."

He shook his head. "Don't bargain with her, Gabby—you'll lose more than you can afford to if you try."

He started to turn away, but I grabbed his arm and pulled him around to face me again. "Please, Mr. Howe. She's got Sam. Please. You have to help me."

His expression changed at the sound of his son's name, his face waking up with a flash of the pain and anger I had seen whenever he buried his cursed gold. For a long moment, he stared down at the unlit pipe he still held clenched in his hand, struggling with some internal dilemma, but, when he looked up again, I could see the resolve in his eyes. "Combs," he said.

"Combs?" I repeated, confused.

"Aila has always loved combs, the kind that some women wear in their hair. The prettier, or the more precious, the better. Be careful about how you word your deal—she'll take advantage of any loophole you might give her. And don't promise her anything unless you are absolutely sure of what it is—we can't have you making my mistake." He smiled tiredly at the reference and glanced back down at his pipe.

"Combs," I whispered again, trying to think of who I could ask for or where I could buy one. "Thank you," I said to Mr. Howe.

He smiled again, and this smile looked a little more like the ones I had known in my childhood. "Good luck, Gabby."

It was great good luck that I ran into Laura halfway to the market street. She greeted me anxiously, grabbing my arm and begging to know if I had any idea about how to bargain with the nixie. "I do," I told her, "but I'll need a hair comb."

"A hair comb." She paused for a second, her eyes flickering unfocused around her as she thought, then half-smiled and reached up into her own hair. "Here," she said as she pulled out the silver comb pinning back her hair, one with silver butterflies fluttering over gold-petal flowers along its top edge. "It was my mother's," she admitted as she shoved it into my unwilling hands, "but…I'd rather have Sam back."

And so, at dusk that evening, I knelt on the bank of Old Luke's mill pond, using the flat, reflective surface of the water to watch myself twist my long dark hair into Laura's silver hair comb, hoping that the sparkle of the pretty accessory would draw the attention of the nixie below.

I didn't have to hope long.

It was only a minute before my presence brought Aila near the shore. I shivered as her face came into view—such a beautiful, terrible face she had, unchanged by the years since the last time I saw it, uncanny and terrifying. For a long, long moment, her nearly-black eyes bored into mine, then she smiled a smile that might have been alluring had it not exposed her sharp teeth. _You were the bold girl who took from me what I was owed the first time I tried to claim it,_ she said, though her smile never altered, her lips never moved.

I fought through my fear to keep breathing. The voice was higher, sweeter, and more innocent than I remembered it being, but it still wrapped around my throat and sucked my breath right out of my lungs. "You remember?" I whispered.

Her smile widened until it was no longer a smile but rather a contortion of evilly-pointed teeth. _Of course I remember; I am fey. We do not have the limitations from which you humans suffer. I see now that you are here once more to take away what is rightfully mine._

"No. Sam's not yours."

_Ah, but he is. He was promised to me, and that, my bold girl, makes him mine._

I rocked back on my heels, not sure what to do. I've never been good at arguing and couldn't think of anything to say to that statement.

The comb. I couldn't argue a way to rescue Sam, but I could bargain one.

I pulled the comb out of my hair again and tilted it into the nearest slice of dying sunlight. The silver butterflies and gold flowers sparkled brighter than the pond's surface, and, as I watched, Aila's eyes widened in desire.

"Isn't it pretty?" I asked her, trying for nonchalance.

_It is._ There was no mistaking the longing in the voice, and I was so eager to grab at my chance that I didn't think my words through.

"I'll give it to you if you'll let me see Sam."

The nixie's expression turned calculating. Then, when the smile reappeared on her lips, I realized exactly what I had said, and it was not the deal I meant to make. _Very well,_ she agreed before I had a chance to reword my bargain. _I will let you see him for the comb._

"No, that's not—" I began.

She cut me off with a bubbly but eerily-echoic laugh. _I care only for what you said, not what you meant, my bold little girl._ And she disappeared into the darkness below her.

A second later, Sam's head rose from the water.

Or, rather, the top part of his head did—he came out only as far as his cheekbones. The moment his nose cleared the water, he began gasping for air and coughing, though, with his mouth still beneath the surface, the coughs couldn't have done him much good. His eyes met mine for barely half-a-second before he disappeared again as though yanked from below, but that half-a-second was long enough for me to see the pain and fear there, and I knew that, whatever was happening at the bottom of the mill pond, whatever the nixie was doing with her prize, she was not being gentle or courteous about it.

The heart-wrenching pain that shot through me when he vanished again made my eyes burn, but I clenched my teeth together, determined not to let that vile fey-creature see me cry.

Aila's face came nearer the bank again, that same twisted, evil smile on her face. I glared at her through my tears. The heat of my hatred felt like it was scalding me, but she only laughed her artless, echoing laugh. _We had a deal,_ she reminded me.

I considered not giving her the comb to spite her, but I was worried suddenly about her taking her resulting anger out on Sam. So I stood and chucked the hair comb as far as I could throw, then turned and marched into the gathering night. Behind me, the comb fell into the pond with a soft _plunk_.

When this was over, when Sam was safely back on land, I'd kill her. There had to be some way to do that—maybe beat her brains out with a rock or stab her with my mother's longest kitchen knife. I'd kill her, and I wouldn't even feel bad about it afterward.


	9. Wool

I hated going back home that night, to face Mr. and Mrs. Howe, and Laura, too, knowing that if I had just thought my words through, I would have been coming back with Sam. Failure hung like a weight around my neck and made me wish I could just stay by the pond until it was over. But I couldn't. I didn't know the nixie well enough to decide what I can use to deal with her—only Mr. Howe could help me there. Besides, with all the worry hovering over everyone's head, it seemed wrong to add my unexplained disappearance to it. So I went home. Everyone—even Mr. and Mrs. Howe, who I hadn't seen in the same place at the same time for months now—was waiting for me in the main room of my parents' house, their eyes shining with so much hope and trust that I burst into tears the moment I crossed the threshold.

My mother rushed up to me and slid her arm around my shoulder. "What's wrong, Gabby?" she whispered, but I was crying too hard to answer her. I didn't need to, anyway; she could see perfectly well what was wrong.

I was alone. I had failed.

Someone else came up beside me and rested a hand on my shoulder, and I was so surprised by the voice that spoke that my tears stopped. "It's all right, Gabby," Mrs. Howe said to me, her voice gentle. "You tried. It's not your fault."

I looked up at her, rubbing away the tears still wetting my cheeks. "I want to try again. Mr. Howe? What else can I use?"

Mrs. Howe turned toward her husband, her lips pressed into a grim line but new hope beginning to cross her face. Mr. Howe frowned down at his hands; for a moment, I thought he wasn't going to answer me, but then he looked up, and I could see that the frown was a thoughtful, considering one. "The combs didn't work?" he asked after a moment.

I shook my head. "No, it did. She liked it. I just…I didn't think through what I asked from her—I asked to _see_ Sam, so…. The comb worked fine; it was my fault. I need something else, something else she would like."

The thoughtful frown returned. Laura, who sat beside him, reached out and pressed her fingers into his arm as he thought; Mrs. Howe's hand where it rested on my shoulder tensed as we waited. The room was so absolutely still that, when Mr. Howe did speak again, I jumped. "An exceptionally fine skein of wool would probably work, too. She was always impressed by my mother's old spinning wheel."

My shoulders slumped. I had never learned to spin, and neither had my mother, and really beautiful wool cost a small fortune to buy.

But Mrs. Howe brightened. "Henry, do you think the fey-creature would like the yarn I spun for Sam's new shirt?" she wondered.

Mr. Howe smiled at her, a wide, happy smile like I hadn't seen on his face for years. "I think she would."

"Then take it." She turned back to me and squeezed my shoulder. "Come by before you go again, and take the yarn I was going to make into Sam's wedding shirt."

I nodded. It was strange how a little part of me recoiled from the thought of Sam getting married even now, even with another, more important thing on my mind.

The next afternoon, having fetched the new trinket with which to tempt the nixie, I was once again on my way to Old Luke's mill pond. The skein of wool yarn Mrs. Howe had given me was indeed exceptional, milky white, soft as velvet, and spun so fine it was practically thread. I couldn't help stroking it as I walked. Even the most difficult fey-creature would be intrigued by this yarn.

I didn't bother to innocently fiddle with the yarn the way I had with the comb; the moment I was at the bank of the mill pond, I held the skein over the water and yelled across the surface, "Come here, nixie. I've got something for you."

The water rippled, and the nixie's voice echoed off the trees. _My name is_—and she said a word that I could have never pronounced or repeated, or even approximated. _Henry Howe used to call me Aila. You must feel free to do the same._

"Aila," I repeated, guessing that obliging her might put her in a more willing mood. "He still does, you know. Call you Aila. When he's not calling you a demon or a monster, that is."

The voice laughed. _Ah, Henry._

I was surprised by the longing in the voice when she said his name. I knew there had been feelings between Mr. Howe and the nixie once, but, the way he had told the story, it sounded like the nixie's feelings had all turned hard and bitter the day he had married his wife. But she didn't sound bitter at that moment; she sounded heartbroken. It might have been just a trick, a way to make me feel sorry for her, but, even if it was, it was convincing, and I thought that maybe falling for it might do some good.

I dropped to my knees by the bank of the pond and stared down at the water where I could just make out the shape of her pale face. "Aila, why are you doing this?" I asked her quietly.

My question confused her, and she took the bait. _What am I doing?_

"Stealing Sam. Holding him against his will in your pond. Taking him away from the people who love him."

_He was promised to me. Despite what you think, he rightfully belongs to me._ The face came closer to the surface as she spoke, and her expression was hard. She knew what I was trying to do.

I leaned toward the pond, willing away my revulsion for the creature there. "But, of all the things you could have asked in return for helping the Howes, you took the one thing that would destroy them. You're destroying them, all of them, did you know that? That morning five years ago, when you first tried to take Sam, when Mr. Howe told us about your deal with him—do you know what an effect that had on them? Mr. and Mrs. Howe spent months fighting, and now they barely even speak to each other anymore, barely even look at each other."

Aila's lips turned up into a malicious smile. _Good,_ she spat, her voice as malicious as her smile._ That fat little woman has never deserved Henry's love._

"But it's not just the missus that you hurt, Aila. You've torn apart Henry's life, too. You broke him. And now you're trying to do the same to Sam and my friend Laura. And me. Why?"

For a single second, just one fleeting moment as I mentioned Mr. Howe's broken heart, Aila's smile disappeared. For one single moment, her eyes flickered with something other than malice and bitterness, something deeper and stronger. Pain. For a single second, her entire expression shifted, and I could see what Mr. Howe's marriage had done to her, how desperately it had hurt her, and how she had buried that pain with bitterness, because bitterness was so much easier to bear, so much less painful.

But then, before I could blink, the moment was gone, and Aila sneered at me. _Did you think you could make me feel regret, you poor bold child? You cannot, for I have none. Henry Howe's son is mine by rights, and I can do as I please with him._

And, just that fast, all my hatred of this creature came flooding back, and, in my frustration and disgust, I again spoke without thinking. "Let me talk to him."

Aila cocked her head and examined the wool yarn in my hand. _For that lovely skein of wool, I will allow you to speak with him,_ she agreed after a moment. She disappeared from sight, and, as had happened the day before, Sam's head broke this surface.

Today, though, his entire head and part of his shoulders came out from the water. He coughed violently for a minute, sucking in air between coughs as though he would never breathe air again.

"Sam," I whispered when he was done coughing.

He looked at me then, his expression pained and worried. "Gabby. What are you doing here?" he demanded.

"Rescuing you. Or, I guess, failing to," I answered with a rueful half-smile.

Sam cast one panicked glance around the area. "The nixie?"

I spoke in a rush, certain that our time was almost up. "Under the surface for the moment. She hasn't tried to hurt me or grab me or anything, Sam, and I'm not going to let her, so don't you dare waste your time worrying about me. And I'm not going to let Laura anywhere near here, so you don't have to worry about her, either. My parents are looking after yours, and I'll be back tomorrow with a better deal, I promise."

The words were barely out of my mouth before Sam dropped beneath the water, again suddenly as though he had been yanked down from below.

I ground my teeth together and flung the wool into the pond before the nixie even had a chance to ask for it.


	10. Flute

Returning home that evening was less difficult than it had been the night before. Though everyone was again sitting in my parents' main room, waiting in various tense poses of hopeful despair, the sight of them didn't break me down into tears, didn't crush me beneath the weight of failure. My mind was on the promise I had made Sam, puzzling through how I could trick a fey-creature.

I could see now that Aila wasn't going to give Sam up for some silly little trinket. If my rescue attempt was going to work, I would have to be clever. I would have to come up with some way to get him out of the water without her knowing that was what I intended. And I would have to know exactly how to do that before I went to the pond again, so my tendency to speak before thinking would not frustrate me a third time.

I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I didn't realize Laura had come up to me until she grabbed my hand. "It's hopeless, isn't it?" she whispered, her voice heavy with tears. "The nixie is never going to let him go."

I looked at her, and, to everyone's surprise—especially mine—a smile crossed my face. "No," I said back, not sure if I was denying the first part of her statement or agreeing to the second. "No, it's not hopeless. The nixie isn't going to let him go, but that doesn't mean it's hopeless. Sam'll be home tomorrow, I promise."

Before I even had a chance to ask, almost before I had turned to look at him, Mr. Howe spoke up. "You might try playing for her. Music, I mean. Fey have exceptional voices, but they don't have instruments," he suggested. For a moment, his eyes shone with memory, then, with a small shake of his head, he very slowly shifted until he was facing his wife.

Neither of them said anything more, but, as they were leaving the house, Mrs. Howe reached out and took his hand.

I didn't sleep that night; instead, I sat on my bed, my flute resting in my opened hands. It was one of the few things, along with Arnold my stuffed dog and a couple of my favorite books, that I had been allowed to bring with me from Longborrow, and it was my most cherished possession. I remember the day I got it, as a birthday gift from my uncle. He had seen me stare at it through the window of the marketplace music shop for almost a year, and he had taught me how to play it. I wasn't a good flutist, not by any means, but the small silver flute was my last and only tie to my uncle, and the thought of parting with it made my heart sting.

I hadn't thought of my uncle much since he died—it had happened so long ago, when I was so young, that I rarely even remembered that I had an uncle. But, that night, staring down at the flute he had bought me and taught me to play, memories of my uncle became bright and clear. Seeing him laughing over some silly stunt he had pulled, feeling his fingers against mine as he helped me reach for the right holes on the flute, hearing his voice as he told me a bedtime story. And later, too, watching him lose his health, watching him wasting away, hearing him moan in pain in the middle of the night, knowing that there was nothing I could do to help. The last time I had seen him, the day before he died, he had begged me to play for him, and I had been so upset that I had burst into tears and run from the room without so much as picking up my flute.

I hadn't been able to play for my uncle, but I could play for Sam.

It was even harder than I thought it would be, sitting on the bank of the mill pond the following afternoon and forcing my lips to blow, my fingers to move, trying to urge a tune out of that precious flute. It had been a long time since I had played it, and I missed half the notes I was supposed to play from my breaths angling wrong, but I was surprised by how comfortable my fingers felt on the body of the flute. They remembered the patterns of notes, the touch of the tiny silver keys, better than my mind did.

I played my uncle's favorite tune, the playful little nonsense ditty he had taught me—the song I would have played for him on his deathbed if I hadn't been such a little coward back then. It didn't sound good, but it felt right, like a tribute to the man who had at one time been almost a second father to me.

And it caught Aila's attention faster than either Laura's hair comb or Mrs. Howe's wool had.

_I did not think you would come back just to be disappointed again, my bold little girl,_ the nixie said over the sound of my playing. I had once thought her voice the sweetest thing I had ever heard, but, when laid next to the sound of a flute—even a flute played as badly as I played it—it might as well have been the grating of a dying engine.

I didn't answer her until I had played the last note of the song. Then, lowering the flute from my lips and gripping it tightly in both hands, I said, "Then you still have much to learn about me."

She laughed. _Yes, I suppose I do. So, you have come to offer me a flute today, have you?_

"I have." The words burned a little on their way out, but I forced my face smooth.

_It is a lovely instrument. It is such a shame that I would have no use for it under the water._

The thought turned me cold. What if she didn't take the flute? I had promised that Sam would come home tonight.

She had to take the flute.

I shrugged like I didn't care either way for her decision and raised the flute back up to my lips. Temptation was important; I had to keep dangling my offer in front of her. I started another tune, a slower, more plaintive one written in a minor key.

Aila listened without interrupting for the entirety of the song, her mouth twisting into a frown that was at first annoyed but began changing to upset somewhere in the middle of the melody. When I was finished, she watched me silently for a long, long moment. _I knew that song once,_ she said eventually. _It is an old fairy revel._

"I've always liked it."

She continued to stare at me. _I would have never guessed you were musical._

I shrugged again.

Another silence followed, this one longer than the first, before she finally asked, _What do you want this time?_

My heart hammered, but I answered her with all the calmness I had practiced, willing myself not to give her any indication of what I was planning to do. "I want to be able to touch him."

Aila's mouth tightened in doubt; I held her gaze and clung to my carefully-blank expression, even though my hands where they touched the cold metal of the flute were sweating in anxiety. She measured my expression for another long moment, then nodded, though the suspicious set of her mouth had not changed. _Very well. For the flute, you may be allowed one touch,_ she agreed and, as before, disappeared deeper into the pond.

When Sam surfaced this time, he surfaced near the bank, just barely out of reach from dry land. I knew I had to do this quickly, before the nixie had a chance to understand what was happening, and I used the much louder sound of his coughing and gasping to cover my whispered instructions.

"Sam, I need you to listen. Can you move your hand? Don't answer aloud, just nod if you can," I said, my voice breath-quiet.

Still coughing, Sam nodded.

"Okay." I set down the flute and leaned as far as I could over the water without falling in, digging my feet and left hand into the soft dirt. "Now. Grab my hand."

My right hand shot out toward him as fast as I could move it, and he reached for it just as fast. Even still, our hand had barely locked around each other's when Aila, screaming with rage, reached out of the water and grabbed Sam's arm. The force she put into dragging him back with her nearly pulled me into the water, too. Sam cringed, either from the pain of the claws in his forearm or the screaming in his ears—maybe both—and I felt his fingers relax around mine. "Hold on!" I shouted to him, grabbing his wrist with my left hand and throwing my entire body backwards. The motion made my feet slip dangerously close to the edge of the bank.

This time, there was no one else around to help.

Aila's demonic scream didn't break; it clawed through the air, writhed around the trees, so loud that it began to hurt my head. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to focus on digging in my heels and holding onto Sam's hand, but the scream was scattering my thoughts, breaking them up into incomprehensible fragments.

Then, just as quickly as it started, the scream cut off into a garbled cry of pain, and the downward pull of her weight fell away. The sudden loss of resistance threw me onto my back and pulled Sam halfway onto the bank, far enough for him to rest his arms on land. I scrambled up to help him haul himself from the pond, then collapsed, panting, next to him when he was clear of the water.

Sam lay sprawled on his stomach on the dirt, his face turned toward me and his eyes closed, just breathing, for a minute, then rolled to his side and looked at me. Pond water dripped into his eyes and blood tricked down one arm, but he smiled. "I think that kick broke her nose," he bragged.

It was a ridiculous impulse, but I couldn't hold in the laughter that bubbled up inside me, and I giggled so hard that tears pushed against my eyes. The relief of seeing Sam back on dry land was making my head spin. "Well, she's a fey-creature," I gasped between laughs, "I'm sure she'll heal fast."

Sam snorted, which made me laugh harder, then joined in. We were both completely out of our minds with relief.

But our laughter was cut off by another scream from the pond, a scream so loud and furious that the trees bent backwards and the waves sloshed over their banks. Sam clenched his teeth together so that it looked like he was holding back a scream of his own, grabbed my arm, and pulled me to the ground next to him, wrapping one arm around his head and one over mine like he was protecting us from a falling projectile.

The scream built to an impossible volume, louder than thoughts, louder than any mortal ears should be able to bear, until everything in the world was only the scream and one unarguable certainty:

It wasn't over.


	11. Passions

The next second was an eternity, an eternity of pain ripping through my head, tearing at my limbs. It was odd how intense the pain was—I had never before thought that I would be able to feel a noise in my hands and feet. But there was nothing that wasn't touched by the nixie's scream, nothing that was spared.

Only because we were so close, his face practically buried in my hair, could I tell that Sam was crying. I couldn't hear it, but I could feel him shaking, could feel the broken rhythm of his breaths against my cheek, and, when I moved my fingers to touch his face, I could feel the hot wetness of tears.

The scream didn't break, but, at that moment, my anger was stronger than any pain.

I slipped out from under Sam's arm and sat up. My head throbbed, and my vision spun, turning the whole world into smears of green and blue and yellow. Though my stomach heaved into my throat as I moved, I forced myself to my feet and turned back toward the pond.

My stomach convulsed; I clenched my jaw and breathed slowly through my nose.

Focused as I was on not throwing up, it took me longer than it should have to realize that there was another figure on the bank of the pond, a naked figure, human but for the unnatural silver-grey color of the skin, standing not three feet from where I was. Long black hair lay plastered in streaks across her body, and her dark eyes were full of such hatred that my stomach turned over again.

Aila.

Could nixies come out of the water? I couldn't think. Exhaustion slammed against me, joining the vertigo that already made staying on my feet all but impossible. My entire body swayed.

_You did not honestly think that you could rob me of my property,_ Aila said. Her mouth never opened as she spoke, and the scream never wavered. _Tell me you did not, or I would indeed have to think less of you._

Everything in me hurt, hurt beyond all ability to bear, but I planted myself between her and Sam. If she was going to take Sam again, she would have to kill me first. For some reason, the thought of dying on her claws didn't scare me the way it should have. "We had a deal," I said, my voice as weak as my knees.

The scream cut off abruptly, and the relief from the pain was instantaneous and wonderful. Aila smiled her vicious, teeth-bearing smile, stretched out one hand, and, before I was able to understand what she did or how she did it, my flute was clenched in her long fingers. _Yes, we did. Thank you for reminding me. Now. Move aside._

I glared at her and took firmer footing. The dizziness was slower than the pain to disappear, but it was subsiding. "No." My voice was stronger now.

Her smile contorted into a grimace, and the way she held her lips and exposed her teeth made me think of a growling dog longing to lunge at my throat. _I do not have to hurt you, girl. Move aside,_ she insisted again.

I had no weapon, no fighting skills, no way to win if it came down to a fight, but I was decided. So long as there was a breath left in my body, I would not let her take Sam. "No," I repeated, my voice softer than before. Softer, but also surer, determined.

Aila moved so fast I wasn't even aware that she had struck me until I was on the ground, the breath knocked out of my body from the impact of the fall. Sharp, hot pain crossed my left cheek; when I touched it, my fingers came back bloody.

I looked up. She had pulled Sam onto his feet, one arm across his chest, the other hand positioned so that her claws were all but shoving into his throat. He yelled wordlessly and scratched at her arm with his right hand, his left arm hanging limp—I hadn't noticed before the odd angle of his shoulder, the purple color of the skin along the ragged edge of his shirt sleeve.

But I didn't have time to think about broken bones or dislocated shoulders, because Aila had Sam and was dragging him back toward the pond. My hands groped along the ground, hunting for something, anything, I could use as a weapon.

They found my flute, which she must have dropped when she attacked me.

I grabbed it and stood, hefting it in my hands, trying to determine what kind of damage it could inflict if only I could swing it hard enough. I would have only one chance, I knew. If I missed, she would kill me.

I watched Sam, waiting for him to meet my eyes. Then, the second he did, I pulled the flute back like a baseball bat and swung it straight at Aila's face. Sam was only just able to duck away from the blow.

The flute broke in two as it connected with the nixie's nose.

Aila screamed, this time the way a human does, with her mouth wide open. This wasn't a scream I had heard before, the baby's-wail scream she had used to put every man who heard it on his knees, nor was it the mind-shattering scream of rage that she had used just minutes ago. This was something new, something broken and so completely human that my blood froze solid. This was the scream of a child beaten to death by his father, a woman attacked and raped in a dark alley. This was pain and fear like I had never seen or known before.

She dropped her arms to her sides and fell to her knees, still screaming. Sam stumbled away from her and, grabbing my arm, tried to hurry us both away from the pond, but my feet were still rooted to the ground where I stood, no more mobile than any of the trees that surrounded us. Sam tugged at my arm; I brushed him off and took a step toward the nixie.

"Gabby?" he hissed after me. "What are you doing?"

He could see perfectly well what I was doing. The real question was why I was doing it. But I couldn't—I just couldn't—leave her there like that. She was cruel and vengeful and twisted, and I thought I hated her, but no one, not even a fey-creature, should ever have to suffer like that.

I knelt in front of screaming nixie. "Aila?" I whispered, reaching out with one hand to touch her bowed head.

She quieted as she looked up at me. There was no more anger in her eyes, no more spite, no more bitterness; her face was all grief, all pain.

"Aila, I think you should leave this place."

She shook her head slowly, then opened her mouth and spoke. "Kill me," she begged, her voice ragged with emotion and hoarse from screaming. "Please. I want you to."

I rocked back on my heels, startled. Certainly, there had been a time when I thought I wanted to do just that, that I would kill her and not even feel bad about it afterward. But, looking at the wild, defeated nixie, I knew I wouldn't be able to do it even if I had a weapon. I shook my head. "No."

"Please," she begged again, and I was sure that if fey could shed tears, she would be sobbing. It made me almost wish I could do what she asked.

I glanced down at the piece of the flute I still held clenched in my hands. The other piece that had flown off when I hit her sat beside the water, within arm's-reach. I grabbed it and pushed both pieces into her lap. "We had a deal," I said.

Aila bowed her head over the halves of the broken flute. "It will not play like this."

"Probably not," I agreed. Regret burned my throat.

She took each piece in one hand, brought them together where they had broken, then handed it back to me, whole. "Play it."

There was not enough feeling left in me to be surprised by this demonstration of her magic; I simply brought the flute to my lips and played the song I had played before, the slower, sadder one written in a minor key, the old fairy air. Her magic must have done something more than just mend the flute, because, even though I had never been a good flutist, the song sounded beautiful.

Aila listened silently, her shoulders hunched and her head bowed so I couldn't see her face. When I was finished, though, she looked up at me with the beginnings of a gentle smile on her face. "That was lovely," she whispered.

I smiled back and handed the flute to her again. "We had a deal. Maybe you could come to the surface to play it."

She held the flute to her chest and sighed all the way from the soles of her feet, or the bottom of her still-broken heart. I stood and turned back to Sam, who was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as though not sure if he should come toward me or stay where he was.

Before I could take three whole steps, Aila called out after me. "Wait!"

I spun around, suddenly suspicious, certain that the whole thing was a ruse.

But Aila only stood and said, "I never learned your name."

An uncontainable smile broke across my face. "I'm Gabrielle Neeley. Gabby." Then I turned and, taking Sam's hand, started for home.


	12. Decision

**Author's Note: My apologies for the extreme tardiness of the update. I could make excuses like the immanency of my college graduation, but that would take a while. So, in the interest of good time management, you will have to simply forgive me and enjoy!**

* * *

"That hurts!"

"It'll hurt more if you don't sit still."

"Here, this'll help bring down the swelling."

"It's a clean cut. Best to just let it heal."

"Ow!"

"Sit _still_!"

"Don't be such a baby."

The voices swirled in an indecipherable jumble around me. I think it was my father who was talking to me, examining the cuts on my cheek, while my mother and Mrs. Howe tended to Sam's dislocated shoulder, and I thought I heard Laura's voice in the mix, too. But I was so brutally exhausted that the words all blended together until I couldn't tell who was saying what anymore.

The rush of energy from rescuing Sam and facing the nixie had lasted me until I had crossed the threshold of my house to discover that, once again, the room was full of everyone waiting to find out what had happened at the mill pond. The instant we came in the door, Laura shot to her feet and launched herself toward us, first at Sam, then me, crying and laughing at once, while Mr. and Mrs. Howe took three steps forward and stopped, their hands clasped. There were several minutes of broken explanations and babbled welcomes, several more pairs of arms around my shoulders and neck, until at last Mrs. Howe pulled back long enough to look us over. Her eyes raked over my scratched cheek and Sam's swollen, discolored shoulder, and she directed us both to chairs and was soon setting everyone else in the room to the tasks of seeing to our injuries.

I glanced over at Sam, who was rolling his left shoulder and smiling a little, wondering why he didn't look tired. I was so worn out that even the thought of getting up to go to bed made me ache. All I wanted to do was sleep, bed or no. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

* * *

It was dark when I woke up again, and I knew from the stiffness in my muscles that I had been asleep for a very long time, but I still felt that I could sleep for many more hours.

I was in my bed—someone must have carried me to my room, because I didn't remember walking there myself. I yawned and stretched; my joints popped and my muscles hurt.

Then I heard it again, the sound that had woken me: the quiet rap of knuckles against my windowpane. There was only one person who would ever come to my window in the middle of the night. I crawled out of bed, still stretching as I tried to move every part of my body, and went to the window.

"It's about time you woke up," Sam mumbled as I opened the window.

"How long have I been sleeping?" I asked. My voice was rough and painful in my dry throat.

"You slept all night last night, then all through the day today."

I smiled. That's what I would've guessed, had I been in the mood to guess. "I was tired."

Sam smiled back. "Well, I didn't wake up 'til sunset, either, so I guess I can't say anything about it."

We faded off. I was tempted to invite him into my room, but it had been a long time since I had had him in my room, and I wasn't sure that it would be acceptable behavior anymore, now that we were all grown up and he was practically engaged to my friend…

It was so silly that, even after all the mess we had been through in the past few days, that I still wasn't sure what I thought of him and Laura together.

"How's your shoulder?" I asked after a moment, deliberately changing the subject of my own thoughts.

"All right." He swung his left arm in a circle. "It still hurts a little, but it works just fine."

"I'm sorry about that."

He dropped his arm down to his side and looked at me, his expression an odd cross between amused and upset. "Better a dislocated shoulder than another minute in that pond." He shuddered. I recognized that haunted look in his eyes; it was the same one he had the day Aila had first tried to take him, five years ago, and it was the same one Mr. Howe had been wearing more and more often until he began helping me to rescue Sam.

"Sam?" I whispered. My hand reached of its own accord through the window to touch his uninjured arm.

He stared down at the windowsill and spoke in a breath-quiet whisper. "It's not a place I ever want to see again, Gabby. It's beautiful under the water—not like you'd ever think a mill pond would be, all sand and silt. It's very clear and dark and cold and—well, it's beautiful, but it's terrible. So terrible, always drowning but never dying. And…not still. Not peaceful. Like the nixie, actually. Terrible and beautiful and…wrong."

I shivered. It was too easy in the dark of night to imagine a place that mirrored in its very construction the broken, twisted feelings of the beautiful, bitter nixie. "But you saw at the end, how Aila was. I think…I think she may yet heal."

Sam looked up at me again and smiled a full-faced smile that made little slits of his dark eyes. "Only you would ever think something like that," he said. Then he continued, more seriously, though his smile didn't fade, "You saved my life. Again. I don't think a simple 'thank you' will suffice anymore."

And then, he took between both of his the hand I had laid on his arm, leaned toward me through the window frame, and kissed me squarely on the lips.

It was very gentle and very quick, barely a full second, but his kiss hit me like a kick in the stomach, knocking all the wind right out of my lungs. Even after he pulled away, I could only stare at him, shocked beyond words, and try to pull in another breath.

I felt that I had a decision to make, that Sam had made an offer I wasn't sure I was ready to accept—or, rather, that was more complicated than I had thought.

I loved Sam. I had loved him since the day we met. I would have never gone to the pond, bartered and tricked and fought with Aila, if I didn't love him. But, looking at him now, I couldn't help wondering if the Sam I loved was the little boy who had been my best childhood friend and if the jealousy I felt toward Laura was more about clinging to the boy I had known than it was about loving the man he was.

That had been Aila's mistake: she had clung so hard to the boy she had fallen in love with that she was not willing to let him grow and change. And, when he had grown and changed anyway, it had hurt her, and she let that hurt become hatred.

I wouldn't make the nixie's mistake. I knew that meant letting go of the Sam I had known as a girl, and the thought hurt, hurt like a swipe of the nixie's claws, but it was the right thing to do. He needed to grow up. _I_ needed to grow up.

"Laura really loves you, you know," I said after a long silent moment. The words squeaked a little at the end, but my voice sounded certain. Maybe even more certain than I felt.

Sam nodded. "I love her, too."

"Then…" I pulled in a deep breath and let it out very slowly. It was the right thing to do, but it was still very hard to say it—the words felt like they were getting stuck in my throat, and they made a lump so large that swallowing was becoming a problem. When I was able to force them out, they came out very quietly, the quietest words of the night, but they came out firmly. "I think you should finally ask her to marry you."

He nodded again, slowly, a thoughtful nod, met my eyes, and smiled just a little. "Are you sure?"

I exhaled through my nose. The sound was almost a snort. "I love you, Sam, I really do, and I want us to stay friends no matter what. But…yes. If you love her, I really do think you should marry Laura. She's been waiting a long time for you to ask."

He squeezed the hand he still held, the tiny smile on his face breaking into a great big one. "Friends, no matter what," he promised. He looked down at our joined hands and squeezed mine again, more gently. "Thank you," he added, and I knew he wasn't just thanking me for my opinion or my information.

Sam was thanking me for a chance to live his life.


	13. Seven Years Later: Music

I stood at the bank of the pond, staring down into the water.

I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing there—I hadn't been to the mill pond in years, not since before Sam and Laura's wedding, and I had no legitimate reason for being there now. But, the past few days, I had felt that I needed to go; I had been dreaming about the pond for almost a week straight, and Sam, who had made it a habit to never mention what had happened there all those years ago, even Sam had been bringing it up. Just in little ways, making statements like, "Remember, Laura, the night I first tried to propose?" but they had me thinking about the mill pond—and the nixie that I supposed still inhabited it.

Old Luke's mill and pond was not how I remembered it; the grass had grown to my knees, and the roof of the house was falling in. Ivy covered every standing wall, and the forest had begun to reclaim the meadow around the pond. It was an all-around eerie scene, and, as I stood at the edge of the water and looked down at the thin film of green scum covering the surface, I wondered why I was there.

Maybe I was waiting for something, for something to happen, for the nixie to emerge from the water and…well, I didn't know what I expected her to do. Maybe cut me with her claws, give me a matching set of scars on my cheeks, or maybe smile and grant me a wish for the price of my first child.

The pond never even rippled.

I tried to call her. "Aila? It's Gabby. Are you still here? I'd like to talk to you." Did I? I didn't think so. But I did want something to happen so I wouldn't feel that this entire trip was a waste of time. I was already late for dinner, and I had promised Laura I would bring a salad, and I was pretty sure they had invited Eric Hopkins to join us.

If nothing happened in the next two minutes, I was going to forget this entire thing and go make a salad to share. Eric would forgive my lateness, because he was a kind and forgiving man—I smiled, and the smile felt warmer and fonder than usual—and Sam and Laura would understand.

"Aila?"

Nothing, not even a breath of wind to ripple the water.

This was silly. For all I knew, the nixie had left, or died. I turned and walked away from the pond.

But I had only made it a few steps before I heard something. It may have been the wind, it was so breathy and light, not at all how I remembered the nixie's voice to be, but the pattern of sound was a recognizable word. _Gabby,_ it said.

I stopped but didn't turn, afraid that looking might scare off the voice. "I'm here," I whispered back.

_I want to thank you._

"For what?"

The voice laughed. Then, before I had a chance to ask her why she was laughing, music floated across the pond, and the music was a sound I did recognize and remember.

I stood still, listening and smiling, until the last note of the old fairy air had faded and the sound of the flute had finished echoing off the trees.

* * *

**Thanks to everyone who has read and commented on the story. Your time and thoughts are much appreciated!**


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